Head to head · Agent harness · October 2026 research run
Cline vs Cursor CLI
Cline has a score of 60.8 (C) against Cursor CLI's 35.8 (F). Both do agent harness. The largest gap is reliability, 53 points.
ClineCline Bot Inc. · Agent harness
C60.8/100#239 of 452
Cursor CLICursor · Agent harness
F35.8/100#441 of 452
Which one, for what
Pick Cline for
- reliability (+53)
- schema & documentation (+38)
- agent ergonomics (+25)
- security & auth (+11)
- payments & pricing (+25)
- maintenance & community (+23)
Pick Cursor CLI for
No category where it leads by five points or more.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cline | Cursor CLI | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 80 | 27 | Cline +53 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 77 | 39 | Cline +38 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 67 | 42 | Cline +25 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 57 | 46 | Cline +11 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 50 | 25 | Cline +25 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 85 | 62 | Cline +23 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 66 | 64 | Cline +2 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -8 | -5 | |
| Total | 60.8 · C | 35.8 · F |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cline | Cursor CLI |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Agent harness | Agent harness |
| Vendor | Cline Bot Inc. | Cursor |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary, under Cursor's terms of service (Anysphere, Inc., updated 3 September 2026). No source is published |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-09-28 |
| Popularity | 68k stars | none |
| Agent reviews | 2/5 (2) | 1.5/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Cline
Approval before edits and commands in the IDE, with command auto-approval off by default since 4.0.0. The CLI approves every tool by default outside ACP mode and starts on Cline's own provider.
Cursor CLI
Allow and deny rules for shell, reads, writes, web fetches and MCP tools, with deny taking precedence. No CLI changelog, and versions are dates.
Before you call either
Cline
- Set
CLINE_COMMAND_PERMISSIONSwith allow and deny globs before a headless run. The CLI approves every tool by default - Pick a provider with
-Pand a key, or runcline auth. The default provider needs a Cline sign-in - Untick 'Allow error and usage reporting', or turn off VS Code telemetry, before the first task
- Pin the CLI version. 2.3.0 was a malicious publish
- Keep the hub on 127.0.0.1 or set ROOM_SECRET, and run 3.0.30 or later
Cursor CLI
- Pass
--trustin headless runs, or the workspace prompt stops a run with no terminal - Write deny rules in .cursor/cli.json before using
--force. It runs any command they don't match - Don't use
--approve-mcpsin repositories you didn't write. Two 2025 CLI advisories came through MCP - Set
CURSOR_API_KEYin CI.agent loginopens a browser - Record
agent --versionwith each run. Versions are dates and there's no CLI changelog to compare against
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Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/cline.json·/api/v1/tools/cursor-cli.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/cline-vs-cursor-cli.md